Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
THE SWORD OF
THE KING
BY
RONALD MACDONALD
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY
THE CENTURY CO.
THE KNICKERBOCKER PRESS, NEW YORK
INTRODUCTION
It is matter of no small difficulty and hesitation for a woman to
tell a story--in especial, her own story--from the beginning of it
even to the end, and to hold, as it were, a straight course
throughout. The perplexities, I say, are many, and among them not
the least is found in these same words, _beginning_ and _end_. For
where truly his story has its inception, and what will be its
ultimate word, might well puzzle the wisest man of this age, or any
other. It has been well said, indeed, that the history of a man is
the history of his troubles--but that fashion of considering will
bring us, by no devious road, to the latter days of the Garden of
Eden and the Fall of Man. Now either I have somewhere read, or my
own heart has privily told me, that the story of a woman is the story
of her love. And this I take to be truth, and do therefore resolve
that the first chapter of my story shall be the first of my heart.
But, lest my book itself should lack apology, I will first tell how
it comes that I, the mere wife and daughter of country gentlemen, and
of learning, as will be seen, wholly insufficient to the undertaking,
should write a book at all.
I write, it is true, but for my own people--for the family that I
pray may be long in the land. But in these days, fortunate indeed,
yet full of swift and dubious change--these days when every second
man, it would seem, must print a book--these days when all the
presses in London are not enough to set before us the tithe of what
is committed by ink to paper--in these days, I say, none can be
assured that what he now pens shall not by some chance hit of fortune
attain the resurrection of print. And if this thing befall my work
of love, and if the book then prove, not the cere-cloth of the
embalmer, but a second and perpetual life to the thoughts of a most
happy daughter, wife, and mother long departed and forgotten, I would
stand well with my reader.
If any stranger, then, do read, let him believe that I have no taint
in me of that _scabies scribendi_, mentioned by Horace, and mightily
inveighed against last Sunday in the pulpit of Royston Church by our
good vicar. This itch must be spreading fast, I thought, if there be
danger of it here, where scarce a full score of the good man's
hearers can spell in a hornbook. And now, lo! I am in dread lest I
be thought infected--I, a woman, with all good things that come to
women, and one to whom the holding of the pen is soon a weariness.
There hangs yet (and long may it so hang!) in our great hall at
Drayton a sword--not in its sheath, but naked, and broken some two
parts of its length from the hilt, but shining bright as on the day
it was first drawn by the great prince that once used it. Beneath
it, also against the wall above the hearth, is the scabbard.
It was on a fine morning of the fall of last year, as I was tending
Ned's new Dutch garden, that I heard loud and childish altercation
proceeding through the open windows of the great hall above me. And
there in a window arose the fair gilded head of my seven-year Mary,
my first and best gift to Ned, and his best to me.
"Pray, madam, come up to the hall," she cried, "for Will is ever
doing things of naught, and he will not be gainsaid by me."
"Nay, child," I replied, loath to lose the sweet air of the morning
and my labor below. "Nay, child, but you must take means and learn
cunning to control him."
"I cannot do so, madam," says poor Mary, well-nigh in tears; "and he
is even now about dismounting the broken sword from the wall. But if
you will come, madam, I will hold his legs while I may."
And with that I ascended in great haste, yet but just in time to save
the relic from desecration and the heir of Royston and Drayton a
backward fall of great peril. For the noise of my entrance caused
his most unserene Highness to turn quick on his heel and to miss in
part the footing, already precarious, that he had attained upon the
mantel. In short, he fell into my arms and into tears with one and
the same movement; tears shed for no danger run--such is not his
habit--but of grief for the plaything that was but now within his
grasp; for, though but rising five, Master William Maurice Royston
would have the broken sword to fight battles with--against King
Lewis, forsooth, and the wicked Frenchmen, in the garden.
"It is but a bwoken old sing, madam-muvver," he cried between his
sobs, "and of a fit length for me, lacking the pointed end, which I
did purpose leaving upon the wall." And so I must needs tell him how
dearly I do prize that shattered weapon, thinking the while of the
shame that was averted, in part by its means, from our houses--and of
the honor, too, that came thereby.
Then Mistress Mary would have the tale of the sword, and Will, his
grief forgot, and joyously bent on touzing my hair to the image of
his own, made instant demand for the fullest narration--"Every word,
madam-muvver--from _onceuponatime_ to _happyeverafter_." Yet the
attempt to bring my tale to the measure of childish apprehension did
lead me into quagmires of question and answer so vexing to our
diverse ignorance, that dinner and Colonel Royston found us scarce
advanced beyond Will's _onceuponatime_. At meat the children
demanded and obtained permission to lay the matter before their
father--the promised history, and the obscurity of word and idea
found necessary by the historian at the very commencement. At last
Ned made as if he would speak, when "Madam," cries Mary, as one big
with a great thought, "madam, will you not write it all down, that we
may read when we have learned the long words?"
"Wise maid!" said her father. "And indeed, Philippa, it is worth the
doing. But, Mistress Wisehead," he continued to the child, "when the
long words are spelt from thy mother's head upon the paper, they will
cry aloud to be spelt back into thine, if you will have the tale."
Now these words did make my poor maid to blush hotly, who had little
love to her book. Yet she answered well, saying: "I know, sir, that
I have been a poor scholar, but, if madam will write the tale, I
purpose to be diligent to the end that I may read well and fitly
against the time it is written."
"'T is plain, Phil," says Ned merrily, "that here is your one hope to
make a scholar of your daughter. And, indeed, sweetheart," he went
on, with more of gravity, "'t is a book I should like well to read
myself."
"And that, sir," said I, "is a compliment you pay to few. For,
beyond M. Vauban's work on fortification, I vow I have not seen a
book in your hand since we were wed."
So, what with a reluctant daughter to be tempted into the path of
letters, and a husband to please,--as I knew by his face his heart
was much set on this enterprise of little Mary's suggestion,--I found
myself committed to the task. Yet, though I have thought much and
uneasily of my promise, I know not indeed when I had begun the
fulfilling it had not Mary this very afternoon brought ink and paper,
while Will followed close with a new pen.
"Write now, madam," quoth the maid.
"Write now, madam-muvver," says Will in faithful echo.
"If I begin now," said I, hard driven for yet a new plea to postpone
the first plunge, "William Maurice Royston will not be able to read
the book when it is done."
"William Maurice Royston," said he, "does not purpose reading. Sis
says reading is irksome. But, when the tale is wrote, madam-muvver
is going to read it to him."
And so it is that I begin.
THE SWORD OF THE KING
CHAPTER I
I was a child of five years when I first saw my lover, and a gallant
sight I thought he made, the more that he found me in sore trouble,
and drew me out of it, as is ever his way. Colonel Royston, indeed,
in these latter days, holds that what I call my memory in this matter
is but the light of his after instruction thrown backward on the dark
screen of childish oblivion. Whether or no (though I take much pride
in the memory, and still will so call it), between him and me the
reader shall not lose, but shall know that on that day my nurse,
weary and petulant with the great heat and our long ramble afield,
was leading me, Philippa Drayton, no less petulant and even more
weary, by the hand, or, rather, was hoisting me by the elbow, up the
great avenue of elms that leads to Drayton Hall. And, fain as I was
for home, her rough speed was too great for my little legs, and her
grip pained my arm, so that I cried out. And then I heard the thud
of hoofs upon the turf by the roadside, and I looked up to see the
little horse pulled well-nigh on his haunches by his rider, whom,
from his own mouth, I soon knew to be Master Edward Royston, of
Royston Chase. As he pulled up, Betty let go my arm, whereupon, for
the greater ease of my legs and the freer exercise of my voice in
weeping, I incontinently sat me down in the road.
"For shame!" says Master Ned, looking down from his galloway upon
Betty, with a frown that had sat well on thrice his years.
"Ay, shame indeed," says Betty, yet blushing to the color of a
well-boiled beet; for she well knew it was at herself his words were
aimed; "ay, 't is shame indeed for a great maid like little mistress
here to sit in the road and weep."
Now Betty spoke in the broad fashion of our parts--the _Doric_, as
Mr. Telgrove calls it, that I have heard is well-nigh a foreign
language to many. For the not giving this outlandish speech to my
readers there are two reasons: the one, that, though I do well
understand it myself, as is but natural, and do love the sound of it
at times, and can even, at a pinch, shape my own mouth to it as well
as my ear, I yet have by no means the skill to set it down, knowing,
indeed, no combination of letters able to convey its sounds; and the
second reason is, that could I make shift so to write, none could
read what I had written--which perhaps, by the well-disposed at
least, might be held a blemish in my book.
But Master Ned, brushing aside her endeavor to hand on her shame to
me, at once declared himself my champion.
"You do not take me," he said, the dark cleft of his frown growing
deeper between his brows, so that it was a marvel to see so much
austerity on so smooth and young a face. "When little maids weep, my
lass, 't is most times the blame of the great ones."
I know not indeed if Colonel Royston yet hold in this belief; but
from that point did I love Master Ned, if, indeed, I had not begun to
do so some seconds before. And I was glad that he sat upon his
horse, that raised his head some few inches above Betty's cap, for
she was indeed a great lass, and twice his age, and his reproof had
in great measure lost its force had he stood dwarfed beside her great
body.
From Betty he turned to me, as I sat in the road, and--"Thou art
tired, little one," he cried, with a great tenderness in his young
countenance, that to me seemed so old. "If you will ride before me,
sweetheart," he said, patting the pommel of his saddle, which was new
and fine, as all about his person, "I and Noll will take most gentle
care of thee."
At which kind words I rose to my sore feet, stretching out my arms,
and crying to him that I would go with him. And, while Betty stood
aghast, yet with never a thought her timid and sickly nursling would
venture such a deed, I had reached his down-reached hands, had
scrambled or was pulled into the saddle before my knight-errant, the
little horse had plunged beneath his double burden, and we were away.
As I swayed and bounced on the pommel in the first strides of that
gallop along the sward that lies between the elm trees and the road,
where the air rushed by so cool and green in the shade, he seized me
with his right arm, fetching me round against his body so that my
chin lay on the arm above the elbow. As my eyes, close shut in the
first shock of our flight, came wide in the great comfort of this
security, I was gazing back over the way we had sped, and I laughed
aloud to see the vain pursuit of Betty. For all but her great self
seemed streaming behind her in the wind of her going--cap, hair, and
petticoat, while the fatness of her trembled as she ran.
For all this, long as it has been in the telling, happened, as it
were, in a single stroke of time, and we were yet little parted from
the pursuer. And, as I laughed, Master Royston, between his chidings
of his nag for so serving us, would know the reason of my mirth--so
"Do but see," I cried, "how Betty runs, and you will laugh too." But
he could not, till he had tamed and admonished little Noll to a
better pace for my ease. And when it was time for him to laugh at
the quaint figure Betty did cut, I had already begun to pity her.
But Master Royston would none of it.
"She is very well served," he said, "for her rude manners to thee,
little one. I have a mind to give her some more of it. She is
weary, is she not?"
"Ay, indeed, poor Bet!" I answered, "else had she not so handled me."
Upon that he drew rein, saying we should wait till she drew near.
After a while, as Noll did crop the grass at his feet, Master Royston
asked me if I could sit astride. "It is no shame," he said, "thou
art so small a maid." And when I was so set, grasping a double
handful of the pony's mane, he said: "When she is close I shall run
to the house. Hold thou fast, little love, for Betty must run as
never before if she would catch us." And as I would have pleaded she
drew near, all spent and blowing, and I felt his knee move, and
little Noll did also feel it, and was gone.
Oh, that I had a pen to tell of that ride! This time I was not
afraid. This time there was no starting aside, no uneasy casting of
my poor small person from side to side in grievous oscillation. And,
oh! I say again, for the pen of some poet (yet I cannot tell whose
to wish) in order to describe this my first taste of the joy there is
in a horse when he is between us and turf good and plenty! Many a
mile and many a beast have I ridden since that summer afternoon, and
I hope so to ride, by the goodness of God, many a year hence; and yet
that long, clean, resilient flight through an air that seemed of
liquid green, flecked with the gold of the sun dropping here and
there through the elms; the soft, fresh thud of hoof meeting turf but
to part anew with the impact--that meeting with the soil that gave so
lively assurance that Mother Earth was yet kindly and strong beneath;
the strong rushing of the wind cooling my face and lifting the
tangled curls back over the close cap; the new-born trust, moreover,
in the arm that held me--all these things are with me now, distilled
into one golden drop of life's very elixir, being, indeed, one of
those gems of memory whereof the sweetness can as little be set fast
by words as the stamp of them can be erased from the mind so sweetly
and strangely impressed.
So much for my memory rather of a frame of being than of an ordered
consecution of events. The curtain of childish oblivion here
descends, as it is wont to fall, swift and dark, on these pregnant
spoils of recollection. I think my dear and honored father's arms
were those that lifted me from the saddle. I have since heard that
Betty was saved by my new friend from the rating Sir Michael had
ready for her, receiving privily from that youthful master of craft a
mint-new crown in earnest of future subsidies, did she prove
thenceforth tender to the little maid. And, indeed, I think she did
deserve whatever wage of kindness the future may have brought her.
For I have of her no further memory of harsh entreatment.
For Philippa Drayton there now began a new life of the happiest. I
had found what all, at one time or another of life, will look for,
yet find most often, I truly believe, when they seek him not--I mean
a true friend. And there is none but his children and mine that can
tell what a friendship it was my friend did give me. He was my
playmate, yet of age and wit to control. He was at whiles my tutor,
for I would learn of him when none else had the art to keep my eyes
five minutes fast on the book. He was my master of equitation, and
did teach me in such manner not only to sit upon a horse's back, but
also to understand what the animal would be at, that I learned in
time to back many a beast that some could not mount with impunity.
Before the five years of our early comradeship were past I would ride
the colts round the paddock, often without bridle or saddle, and
seated astride, as in my first ride with Ned, which I have described
above. And he would blame me for a madcap, and yet, if none else
were by to see, would laugh at the frolic, and praise my sitting of
the nag, and my tricks of control. With his coming into my story,
which before was none at all, my old dread of animals, along with the
ill-health of my earlier days, had vanished, to be replaced by a pure
confidence in all that breathed, which in itself, maybe, was to the
full as childish, but, without controversy, far safer for the child.
Anon, Ned was himself my steed, to be guided by tuggings of the hair
and ears often, I doubt me, little merciful. And, if not the
swiftest, he was surely of all I have ridden the most willing. It
could not fail that, thus together, we should quarrel often. I mean,
it could not fail where such a child as I made one of the pair. But
Ned would bear my poutings, my bickerings, and every wayward mood
with a smile when he might, and without it when he must. But did
some act of mine wrong some other than himself, as when I would cuff
Betty, or strike dog or horse for the easing of my own passion rather
than the fit correction of the animal, then would he show the sterner
mettle that was in him. Then he would not forgive till confession of
wrong or pardon was asked. And, was I stubborn, he would stay away,
even days together, but I must submit. Once it was a week--seven
days, most long and dark for erring Mistress Philippa. For he said:
"You are my friend, little Phil, and some day I shall wed thee, and
it is not for my honor that you do thus, or so."
Thus Master Edward Royston, aged some fourteen years. Yet was my Ned
no untimely saint, fitted but for the fatal love of the gods.
Passion and frolic were in him, laughter, and--no, not tears--only
twice have I seen them in his eyes, heard them mar the government of
his speech. Boyish escapades were plentiful enough with him to give
his mother and my father some knowledge of the unbending nicety in
the point of honor which was yet seen in his most boyish prank or his
strongest passion of anger. For the power also of anger was in him,
growing, indeed, in its outburst less frequent as he grew in stature,
but gaining rather than losing force with its rarer manifestation. I
touch on this note of his character designedly, inasmuch as it was
the cause of the great change that was soon, I mean at the end of
twelve years from our first meeting, to come into my life. But of
that in its place.
Sir Michael Drayton, of Drayton Manor, in the southward part of the
county of Somerset, was already well on in years when I, the second
child of his second wife, was born. And that was in the eighth year
of the second Charles. For he, my father, first saw the light in the
year of grace 1609, and thus, at the time of my meeting with Ned,
which was in the summer of the year 1673, and in the sixth year of my
little life, he had fulfilled sixty-four years, of which number some
five and forty had brought him trouble sufficient, on moderate
computation, to furnish out a fair portion of strife and affliction
to six ordinary men. For, ardent and devoted Cavalier though he was,
't was not the outburst of the great war of the Rebellion that marked
the worst point of his troubles. Often in his old age have I heard
my dear father tell how, after the tedious and ever embittering
doubts and hesitations of that civil strife that had endured in
England since the coming of the first Stuart, to him as to many
another the resort to arms came as a clearing of the vexed mind and
settlement of conscience perturbed. Of the momentous action of the
Long Parliament, in the year 1642, I have heard him say: "Then at
length our duty was plain. I, for one, slept better o' nights
thereafter than I had done since the meeting of the Short
Parliament." For Sir Michael had been elected of the shire for that
hapless assembly, as subsequently for its successor, the Long
Parliament; of his seat in the latter he was illegally deprived when
he withdrew from Westminster to join the King at Oxford, which he did
in the late spring of that same year (I mean 1642), in the excellent
company of my Lord Falkland and the late Lord Chancellor Clarendon,
then Sir Edward Hyde. And thenceforth his life was war, and raising
of money in order to its prosecution; in both which perilous and
comfortless means of assisting his sovereign and of hurting his foes
Sir Michael Drayton was ever forward, to the most lamentable
detriment of his own person and estate. He raised on his own land,
and maintained at his own expense, a troop of horse that were ever
with him throughout the first period of that long and evil war, I
mean until the fight at Naseby in Yorkshire. There he lost great
part of his following upon the field, and was himself grievously
hurt. Yet with that scent, as I may say, which led him in all those
years ever where the work was hottest, he was found again in the
Welsh rising three years later, whence, escaping after the fall of
Pembroke Castle, he joined himself with his little remnant of
troopers to the Scots, in bare time to share their overthrow at
Warrington by the late Protector (although he had not then that
title).
Sore in mind, sick in body,--for he was never wholly healed of his
great wound in the right thigh which he took at Naseby,--he reached
home only to hear of his King's terrible end. 'T is perhaps strange
to tell that this awful deed of murder and sacrilege put a new heart
in that much-buffeted and enduring gentleman, my father. That
Martyrdom, I think, went far to atone, in Sir Michael's mind and
heart, for certain wrongs and fickle veerings of purpose, proceeding
as much from the complexion as the misfortunes of that pious Martyr
and unhappy King. No word did he ever utter to asperse the royal
memory; yet once in the passage of these more recent transactions of
state, which have brought into my life, as into that of the nation at
large, so much of betterment, did I hear him murmur (though but as
for his own ear alone), "Ay, ay--he served us best, when they served
him worst." Be that as it may, from that hour until the happy
restoration of King Charles the Second, all that he had--the remnant
of health, much of his land, the lives of his sons, the thoughts of
his mind, and the prayer of his heart, were given to forward that
happy end, which was achieved, as all men know and many remember, in
the year 1660--but, for the house of Drayton, at what a cost!
But my father's story I must not make overlong, lest I never come at
my own. In brief, then, all his money and much of the Drayton
timber, with here and there a fair slice of his land, were gone while
the head of the royal Martyr was yet where God had set it. From that
fatal day, however, he set himself to the husbanding what God and the
rebels had left to him. Here again was disaster in wait for him; for
when, by dint of living as a peasant, and by help of his breeding of
horses (for which he was already famous in the west, and, in the
early years of the war, well known to the farriers of Prince Rupert's
Horse), he had begun to lay by the means of one day aiding the cause
to which his life was given, he was, through the lust and malice of a
certain Puritan neighbor, denounced as a Malignant, and most heavily
fined by the despotic rule of the late Lord Protector Cromwell.
Through Mr. Nathaniel Royston (of whom more in good time), he was
warned of this instant spoliation, and was so enabled privily to
convey his store of gold into France, and to lay it in the hands of
his exiled sovereign, to be spent, no doubt, in far other fashion
than the earning of it. And though he proved to the commissioners
sent down upon that proditorious information to be less worth the
plucking than had been supposed, yet his acts in the late troubles
being known, and somewhat, perhaps, of that sending of money into
France leaking out, the blow fell upon him even as his psalm-singing
but ungodly neighbor had designed. So, the gold in France, land must
be sold. And sold it was, but not as that godly brewer of Yeovil did
intend--to wit, into his own hand; for here again Mr. N. Royston did
us great service, buying of the land which adjoined his own a small
portion at so high a price that the great fine was paid with the loss
of a few fields.
Yet none the less was the work all to begin again. So begun again it
was, and that most stubbornly. And it was well the land was fat, and
the breed of horses unmatched in the west country, for, when our
western discontent grew to a head in the year 1655, Rupert, his
youngest son by his first lady, was with Penruddock at Salisbury,
whither he carried and left, on his own undertaking, most of that
painful saving. Some few of his following drifted back to Drayton,
but Rupert had spent the gold and himself for his King, even as Sir
Michael had now spent all his family. For Henry and Maurice, the
elder sons, had fallen, the one at Worcester fight, the other in duel
with a Frenchman at The Hague, whither he had followed his sovereign,
his opponent, it was said, being a spy of Cardinal Mazarin, and
suspected by my brother of some ill intent to his exiled prince.
Over and above all these troubles, that same affair of Penruddock's,
so foolish and ill-devised, cost Sir Michael within the year the life
of his wife, after a union with her of six and twenty years of that
nature as to soften much the sting of his many afflictions, though it
could not keep her own heart from bursting with the loss of the last
child of their love.
His thereafter speedy marriage with my own dear mother, whom I do but
faintly remember, had in it no token, whatever the show may have
been, of disrespect to the former Lady Drayton. But here again is a
story to excel, perhaps, in the right telling of it, the length of my
own. Yet I do not purpose a full relation of so much sorrow, holding
that the strong hand only of a master in letters should essay the
portraiture of such tragedy as was in those days often enacted in the
houses of many an old Royalist family.
Mr. Denzil Holroyd's only surviving child, the lady who afterwards
became my mother, had passed a jejune childhood in a house
impoverished by her father's loyalty to the Stuart cause, and
persecuted in the latter days, even to bitterness, for its stanch
adherence to the faith of Rome. She had been the close and tender
friend of the first Lady Drayton. Following hard upon the death of
that lady came fresh ill-fortune upon the Holroyd family, of which
the death of Denzil, its head, was a part; and Mistress Alicia
Holroyd, left without a natural protector, and stripped by cruel laws
and wicked informers of her last acres, flung herself late of a
bitter winter's night against my father's door, begging shelter from
the inclemency of Nature, and protection from the baseness of her
Puritan cousin, who, not content with the filching her inheritance,
would have added her person to his plunder as the price of food and
lodging, hoping thus to make sure his title against future turns of
fate. Silas Holroyd pursuing, found her clinging as some frightened
child to my father. Silas soon returned the way he came, but after
what words with my father was never known, since he dared tell no man
what passed between them, and none dared question Sir Michael. Yet
Alicia could not dwell in the house where now was no mistress, so out
of this difficulty, as of so many another, my father must needs find
a way; which indeed he did, as the words he used in telling me of the
matter shall now inform any that has read so far in my narrative. "I
told your good mother, little daughter Phil," he said, "that I had
little power or credit in the land to help my friend. 'But,' said I,
that bitter night that she came to me, 'if you will wed an old man
and a broken, there is yet left in Drayton the strength to make some
show of cover for the mistress of his board and the partner of his
bed. 'T is a poor thing to offer, but it will serve to make a fool
of that knave Silas, when he shall try, as well I know he will, to
recover the custody of your person by a process of law, charging me
with your abduction. I will cherish you well, if you will have me
for husband.'" And if the poor lady let gratitude usurp the place of
love who shall blame her, being in such straits? Not I, her most
happy daughter. Were it but for the father she gave me, I will thank
her next in order only to her God and mine till I die, and after, I
do firmly trust.
And so out of hand they were married, nor do I think either found
cause of regret. For the lady found peace, and license to practise,
as far as might be, the duties of her faith, with now and again the
comfort of its holiest offices at the hands of some wandering or
hunted priest. For my father's old and loud-spoken hatred of Rome,
now indeed much softened by the mellowing of his own temper and the
fellow-feeling of a common persecution, was yet so well fixed in the
memory of that countryside, that Mistress Alicia Holroyd was
generally held to have abjured the errors of Rome in committing the
error of becoming Lady Drayton. Certain it is, that none ever
discovered the secret chapel so cunningly hid among the wine vaults,
devised by Sir Michael, and painted and floored, dressed and
furnished by no hands save his and those of Simon Emmet. I have
heard that Simon would grumble as he worked, predicting ill to come
of this idolatry. For his own soul, he would say, he cared not so
greatly, in the pleasing of so sweet a lady--but, for Sir Michael's,
his same sweet lady's, and their children's to come, he would the
cursed job were not to do. But, if bidden then to lay down his
tools, "Nay," he would say, "you cannot do alone in the business.
And if it be sin, as I verily think it, I will not hand it on to
another."
From the few and petty memories of my infancy, antecedent to my first
encounter with Ned, there stands out the vision of my mother's face,
as she would ascend the stair that led, as I understood then, and for
many a year thereafter, but from the cellars; the vision of a face
shedding upon all a shining calm, so tender, and withal so glorious,
as no cunning of the greatest painter's brush, I think, has ever
coaxed into the nimbus of his saint. It is how I recall her face in
my dreams, sleeping or waking. And when I learned at length the
secret of the chapel I understood many things that each must find for
himself.
Her first child was my brother Philip, born in the year 1658. Ten
years later she gave my father his only girl and last child,--me,
Philippa, to wit,--and died herself in the first days of the year
1673, some five months before my rescue from Betty at the hands of
Master Royston, to which, in this opening chapter, as in my life, I
will yet be referring all things, as it were an Hegira.
And all this time, though I am ever dinning this Master Royston, this
Ned, this time-worn but, I hope, sempiternal lover, in your ears, as
yet introduction of him into these pages does as much lack formal
ceremony as did the beginning of our friendship.
Mr. Nathaniel Royston, of Cheapside, in the City of London, was of a
well-known and highly respected west-country parentage. Apprenticed
in London at an early age to a merchant of repute, he had soon
displayed considerable sagacity, not only in the intricacies of the
Turkey trade, but also in the more perilous and no less subtile
labyrinth of matters political. As in the first, after winning his
way to a large share in the undertakings of him who had been his
master, he had devoted himself to the patient amassing of a large
fortune, so in the second he had used his judgment and foresight to
the one end of retaining intact what he had so laboriously gathered.
I would not be understood to throw anything of blame on his conduct
of his life. Ned hath often told me that to his father all
governments were alike, for all, he would say, were equally at fault,
and that it became a man of his temper and estate to make in each
case the best of a bad business. The Turkey trade thriving, Mr.
Royston continued to increase by this means of regarding affairs of
state, in despite of King and Parliament, Army and Protector,
Presbyterian and Independent. And this in so great measure that, in
the year 1653, he acquired by honest purchase those lands of the
family whose scion he was, which lay in the county of Somerset. So
he came to live among us, but it was not until two years after the
Restoration that his son Edward was born, that being six years after
his marriage to the Lady Mary Harlowe. He was wont to say that it
was indeed strange that the sole precarious venture in the life of a
solid and cautious merchant should prove his most profitable,
referring in this to his marriage with a lady whose family had been
proscribed for its affection to the royal cause. In this
circumstance, indeed, there would appear to be some resemblance
between the fates of my mother and Ned's; with this difference,
however, that in Mr. Royston's case love impelled to the single
hazardous act of a lifetime, while in my dear father's, duty and the
very danger itself brought about a union ultimately rewarded with
affection.
This Mr. Nathaniel Royston, after some twenty years spent mostly at
his estate of Royston Chase in our neighborhood, during which time he
had much endeared himself to my father by many acts of a thoughtful
and temperate goodness, which his wealth and general esteem well
enabled him to perform, died quietly in his bed in the same winter as
my dear mother.
Of my own brother Philip, my early recollection is most slender. His
was, I believe, ever a studious and contemplative complexion of mind,
which had led him at an early age to adopt, against the earnest wish
of his father, the erroneous opinions in the matter of religion
pressed on him, I am sure, far more earnestly by his mother's
spiritual advisers than by herself. I have neither wish nor ability
to expatiate on this subject, and will only say, in justice to both
sides, that it was more on account of the sorrow I had seen deeply
graved upon my father's face when Philip's adhesion to the Church of
Rome was mentioned, than from any ecclesiastical predilection of my
own, that I found means to resist certain assaults by Philip and
others on my own acquiescence in the position and authority of the
Church of England as by law established.
It fell shortly after the Restoration that the death of the childless
Silas Holroyd much simplified the process at law whereby the attempt
was making to recover my mother's property. The matter being brought
to a successful issue, the revenues of our family became so vastly
improved that in the year 1676, when I was eight years of age, and
Philip eighteen, he was sent travelling on the continent of Europe
with a governor. I heard my father murmur, as he returned to the
house after bidding his son farewell: "Pray God it drive some of the
folly out of him!"
This, in my father's view of it, was far from the result of that
foreign tour. After a while he ceased to tell me of Philip and his
letters, reading them ever in a clouded silence; till at length I was
bidden not to speak of my brother, and I knew some bad thing had
befallen, but what, for many years, I did not learn. Nor did I see
him after that departure for a space of twelve years. And when at
length I did see him--but that I will tell in its place.
I had thought clearly to lay, as it were, the groundwork of my
narrative in far fewer words than these that stretch already behind
me like a dusty and winding road at the traveller's back.
Now, when as a child I would read a tale or history (after that Ned
had coaxed and driven both desire and skill of reading into my little
head), I did use to pass over the early pages in scorn, and "to come
to the part," I would tell the chiding Ned, "where things fall to
happening." Since many in graver years do keep lively this desire of
action and movement in what they read, I am now resolved to reach, as
quickly as may be, the place "where things begin happening."